‘A Hologram for the King’ Trailer: Tom Hanks Gets His Groove Back in Saudi Arabia

Like Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, A Hologram for the King also features a middle-aged white protagonist who travels to the other side of the world for their career, only to find themselves in the process. But the first trailer for the latter promises something a bit different: Overlooking the terrible ’90s voice over, the new film from Tom Hanks and Cloud Atlas co-director Tom Tykwer appears to offer a rather idiosyncratic take on middle-age self-discovery with quirky visuals and a little fourth-wall-breaking.

It’s hard not to be interested in a movie when the trailer opens with Hanks singing the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” as his beautiful house and his beautiful wife evaporate into purple smoke. Unfortunately, the voice over kind of takes the wind out of the sails here — it’s distracting, to say the least.

Tykwer previously co-directed Hanks in Cloud Atlas along with the Wachowskis, resulting in a divisively ambitious epic, and if nothing else, their latest collaboration will be anything but boring. Based on the Dave Eggers novel, A Hologram for the King is described as follows:

Cultures collide when an American businessman (Tom Hanks) is sent to Saudi Arabia to close what he hopes will be the deal of a lifetime. Baffled by local customs and stymied by an opaque bureaucracy, he eventually finds his footing with the help of a wise-cracking taxi driver (Alexander Black) and a beautiful Saudi doctor (Sarita Choudhury).

A Hologram for the King also stars Ben Whishaw and Tom Skerritt, and hits theaters on April 22.